Is it already time for open only arguments again?
Bots in LYR
- Thread starter Phoenix13
- Start date
Why are you doing that? Sounds awfully boring. Even more boring then repairing starports, and THAT was already very boring
Ah!
Got your intention now. Guessed it but wasn't sure.
Good question!
Cause I joined powerplay almost simultaneously with playing the game when being launched on PS4.
I liked - and still like - the idea of broader/bigger political landscape game within the game (despite its poor execution) and in the beginning of course was young (inexperienced) and foolish enough to believe we/I could have an impact.
Cause I personally think LYR is the best power and the most altruistic one - every player benefits from our 15% discount regardless of being pledged to whomsoever or not. Even though I do not need any discount anymore and do not need new ships.
And I like playing a - bottom line - corrupt corporation guy selling his soul for a profit.
Cause my/our PMF is - by purpose - located in one of the profitable LYR control systems and we promised to protect it. This protection promise includes it needs to be fortified with current mechanics. Week by week by week.
Cause my/our friends from SiriusGov provided me a home and guidance and help when I started playing the game. And I would feel like a traitor or deserter when leaving only for it becomes/became difficult.
Bottom line - it's a question of honour.
I'm not arguing that it will fix the problem. Please read what I write. I'm saying it will help.
First, its up to FD to police networking and resilience. ToS breaking issues are an issue for the whole game.
Open PP will help a great deal with AFK. It will become a massive risk to keep on doing this. But, AFK != bots. Its simply having massive shields and heal beams to make a group invincible to fire and farm. If you removed PG / heal beams this issue would not be a problem. If you used the new CZ mechanics, that would help as well as you choke the food supply and ships are much tougher (plus AFK you can't go after Spec Ops etc). What FD need to do is address the balance of shields and weapons which are the underlying issue. FD tried to amend shields but were shouted down by people who should have known better.
Open only is a Kinder egg, as it has fringe benefits that enhance a lot of Powerplay. It helps when you can at least go out and observe who is in a certain place and fight them (such as expansions or HQs). From my own experience of playing Powerplay non stop from when it started years ago Open greatly enhances it- simple (and they are simple) runs through dodgy territory (especially close to the cycles end) become an exercise in vigilance and fear.
The reason bots can thrive is that Powerplay forting requires about 50 keypresses for each flight, and each flight (esp in Solo) is nearly the same each time. Its that utterly basic simplicity that is the root cause of these problems.
All this is to make PP better using the scant tools we have. The only real agenda I can see is some people trying to derail positive change in a feature they never touch.
Its ironic that a lot of these 'players' have barely played Powerplay, making them hypocrites when they chime in. These people are afraid of Open being forced on them when Sandro said repeatedly this was not the case. And despite that, the same seven forumites kept on bleating the same shrill nonsense over and over.
The ultimate and final irony is I wish FD published the PvP focussed Powerplay overhaul which would have satisfied everyone.
If PowerPlay goes open only.. And I don't care either way.. Will players claiming bounty rewards for the faction in your system effect the system? Will players delivering goods to your station effect the system? Will lot of other stuff.
It is not just a simple case of PP Open only. It's how that change effects the entire game and the entire playerbase. How will BGs work? Open only?
And all that for something that will have zero impact on Bots.
The simple fact is using the net architecture we have (which is not going to change) and I wanted to cheat, I could fly a fleet of craft thru open space and no-one would be any wiser. A little tip for you. Modes are nothing more than flags.. Do you think they're different servers? Open players see players with the 'open' flag turned on (being simplistic) and they don't see players with the 'pg' flag turned on. So imagine if there was a way to be in Open, and change that flag?
If you want an example of this, look at recent bugs or the Gnosis fiasco. Players in PG were able to see players in Open. More recently over Christmas, I was seeing chat from Open players while I was in Mobius PG.
Not withstanding, the original agreement at kickstarter was that all modes (not just open) would have access to everything.
Further and apart form Open Only; I feel you are trying to fight for one result using multiple points of attack. Which is not necessarily a bad thing unless half the audience have no clue what your're on about. AFK ? Away From Keyboard? How is that related to PP? Shields/Beams/Healing, how are they related?
It appears (to me) to be a cash-grab to have PP all to yourselves.
Saying it's up to FD to police networking is crazy. They have net code that is simply not MMO resilient. It never was and I highly doubt they're going to rewrite it now. They cannot police what they cannot see. And even if they could, trying to extract the 20 or bots from thousands upon thousands of transactions a night is nigh impossible. And even then, if they did find a 'suspect' they have to prove it.
ToS. Sorry but the ToS are not worth the paper they're written on. Don't do this, don't interface with third party programs blah blah blah, and then they allow Voice Attack. Voice Attack on it's own gives so much automation it's crazy. It's a free link into your ship. Any keystroke or HID driver can hook directly into Elite and Frontier Support it. So that in and of itself, negates any ToS they may have.
Frontier have no control over what I read from my screen and how or what I use to read it. If it's on my screen I can do whatever I like. The only ToS that becomes active is that I may not interfere with the memory space. Nothing there stops me reading their code or their data streams or anything else.
Even without Voice Attack, any HID savvy coder can use their joystick without ever touching it. meaning they can control their ship.
Nope, Open Only PP maybe a thing of fancy but I don't see coming to a screen near you any time soon.
And even if it does happen, it won't save you from the bots. But to be honest, I don't think bots are the real issue here.
...Or let everyone use bots. You still need a running client with an authenticated user in order to use a bot, maybe thats why we can have only one Commander per account
Funny you should mention that - I made that suggestion in the other thread concerning this same subject. Bots for everyone. Turn them ALL loose and watch the fun ensue.
Reason: If you can't have EVERYONE in open and cross-platform instancing, some have bots and some don't, the only way to level the playing field for EVERYONE is for everyone to have bots for PP usage. That'll make it fair for everyone (as long as you have a cutter or an anaconda, right????).
As it stands now, the only way to blow this thing wide open is for someone to join this group in secret, gain their trust, learn about the bots, usage, etc, then expose the hell out of them. As for me, I haven't figured out how to do macros yet.
Or quit PP altogether since there's no realistic way to beat a group using bots. Which is a thought, isn't it? What if everyone just stopped doing PP until this bot issue was solved?
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As long as someone teaches the bots to mine a full hold of 320 void opals per evening, can I haz one?
Or even better, let it find me some military supercaps or pharma isolators every hour or so.
Thats not even close to a fact. Even if you are able to make a player see your fleet-of-whatever that isn't there, fine, that why they only send the lower level important (and dynamic) stuff over P2P. Powerplay, but also other buy/sell transactions, are a different story and not communicated over P2P but have a dedicated client/server connection. Why else do you think the so called SW Developers are busy with lolbots instead of making the transactions themselves? Because getting fake authenticated transactions across to a server is child play?
With that, I agree.
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In the proposal the BGS is limited to that control system rather than today where the whole bubble counts. This limited footprint is a good place for the interface between a multi-mode BGS and an Open PP. In an ideal world both would be totally separate with no impact on each other but that was not on the proposal. The only minor issue would be PMFs in control systems- but most PMFs support the Power.
I never ever knew that modes limit islands and players in them.
I thought cross mode chat was actually a feature now.
Kickstarter said a lot of things, none of them mentioning Powerplay and its design which has been compromised by multi modes and poor game balance.
Here is an example of why combat expansion farming with AFK ships in PG is lethal and corrosive to the game: (UM = undermining) The response here explains why weighting would be pointless.
I can earn 1.5K merits in an expansion per game session (about an hour). So thats 1.5 x 6 = 9000 merits per week.
Now, take that 1.5 and multiply it by say, 12 (for a PC running during work hours), thats 18,000 merits. X 6 = 108000 merits possible per cycle as it is now. Facing that in a combat expansion is impossible unless you afk too.
A 50% weighting is 54,000 merits, or six times as effective as what I can do playing normally.
Even at a piddly 10% = 10800, so a PC doing AFK is as effective as I am at maximum.
But what if they run the AFK / Bot for longer? 18 hours, all day? PC Multiboxing is cheap too. At a full 24 hours a day for a cycle, they earn 216000 merits currently, at 10% thats 21600- currently 2.4 times more effective.
AFK is not a problem for UM because that requires action- however combat expansions can be AFK to the cows come home because FD are not using the new CZ mechanics.
'Points of attack' is simply me trying to show the value that feature would bring outside of the limited way it fights botting in conjunction with other design features.
This is why Open mode in this contest is part of the solution. Keyword: Part
Its FDs rules you agree to every time you start. If you choose to break them then go for it.
Open on its own won't change bots or AFK, in combination it will make a difference.
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Absolutely agree 100%
FDev support the use of HIDs and VoiceAttack. That covers anyone to interface with HIDs and use VA for macros and keystroke manipulation.
If your goal is to get PP open only, would it not be better fought as a separate argument than one aimed at 'bots'?
Why would anyone needs to risk modifying buy/sell transactions? Just auto land your ship, and use keystroke emulation to open the commodities windows and auto sell.
Because Open PP touches on two areas: it has a mild benefit in catching out 5C, it enhances the general game. Here I'm trying to argue that former benefit. At no point am I saying Open will cure everything, I'm labouring in each post to say that its part of the package and in combination would be beneficial.
Well, you need an active and authenticated client (read running PC with a running game) so bot behavior can be tracked back to an identity, you can only have one bot per game/account, you need to code a clumsy process to interact with an even more clumsy human UI. Sounds all a bit ghetto to me.
And maybe because you implied it was easy?
It's not, by the way...
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Goose4291
Banned
Someone did a while back as I recall. It was part of the initial discovery submission.
Would that fix the issue? I know getting rid of the docking computer would... Or even better, after bot detection, let it loiter a pad for 10 minutes. A real player would correct the issue. C'mon MoM, you can do it
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Bots have still never been confirmed. It's the same paranoid rumour mungers cropping up every time the word bot is mentioned, with the occasional new convert.
I agree with de-coupling modules and powerplay 100% and have said so to others.
But for the love of god please don't create yet another ship/weapons grind.
Well, yes, of course that would be the preference, but I didn't want my suggestion to go ignored as unrealistic, this is FD we're talking about here, gotta add some grind or they'll never go for it.